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Finding places to carry all your digital stuff

I just don't get the overwhelming appeal of the iPod, Apple's MP3 player. It's a beautiful device to be sure, but it does exactly what many, many other similar players do: It plays MP3s. Other brands are better, less expensive, have more capacity, are easier to use, and so on. But the iPod has something more than 85% market share. That's incredible — that's like finding that 85% of people in the country drive Toyota Camrys. It just doesn't make sense.

I didn't go for an iPod when I bought an MP3 player. I wanted something smaller, so I got one that uses flash memory instead of a hard drive — a Creative MuVo TX. It packs 256 MB into a tiny package, which for me means several hours of audiobooks to listen to in bed. (Audiobooks = no light to annoy the missus.)

But my MuVo doesn't come close to the capacity of the iPod and other hard-drive-based players which, with their multi-gigabyte drives, can hold thousands of songs. All that in a device that fits in a shirt pocket — that's an incredibly large amount of space in an incredibly small amount of space.

But this isn't a column about the iPod. It's about that storage — the fact that we are beginning to take for granted the ability to carry huge amounts of data in our pockets. The iPod is a little bigger than a deck of cards, yet can hold the text of something like 40,000 books.

Being able to carry a ton of information in a two-ounce package is not only cool from a geek perspective, it's also becoming a necessity. We're not only a more mobile society, we're also an almost entirely information-driven one. Data are everything — names, addresses, documents, images, music, video — and we feel the need to take it with us.

Quoth George Carlin, "That's all you need in life, a little place for your stuff." Since we started using computers for our data, we started finding ways to carry this digital stuff around with us.

Paper or plastic?

When I was at the Bronx High School of Science in 1980 (before moving up to Stuyvesant), I got my first taste of computer programming. We were taught the basics of BASIC and given a stack of punch cards to take home. Each card held one line of code. (Windows XP has something like 40 million lines of code.)

We were very careful not to drop our stacks of cards.

An alternative to cards was paper tape, which was effectively a long string of those cards. Same idea — holes punched (or not punched) in the paper indicated 1s and 0s. The idea actually originated in 1801 from one Joseph Jacquard who wanted to control his looms; it allowed them to recreate the same fabric pattern over and over. (Punch cards and paper tape still live with us today in the ASCII system (c.1963) — often incorrectly called "plain text" — which was originally designed for that paper media.)

As you might imagine, paper was not the best way to carry around programs or data. Each card had 80 columns — 80 bytes. So it would take almost 803,000 cards to hold the MP3 version of "For What It's Worth" that I'm listening to right now. Not exactly portable.

Enter magnetic tape.

Instead of relying on holes punched in paper to represent the bits, it used a plastic tape with a magnetic coating; the ones and zeros were represented by differences in the magnetism. I still have, somewhere in my attic, my old Timex-Sinclair and Commodore 64 computers. They used magnetic tape to store programs: in this case a standard audio cassette.

Magnetic tape is decent for storage, but it's sequential— that is, you can't search for something. Your computer has to 'listen' to it beginning to end, the same way you have to fast-forward through a cassette to get to the song you want, where with a CD you can bop over track 3 instantly.

IBM came up with a better idea using the same concept. Instead of having a long magnetic tape on a spool, in 1967 David Noble made the material round and spinning: the first floppy disk. Eight inches across, each "memory disk" (it was read-only) held 80 KB, and the system debuted in 1971. (Fun historical note: Noble was supervised by Alan Shugart, who went on to found storage giant Seagate.)

A few years later IBM squeezed 256 KB onto the same size disk and also made it writable — the first 'modern' floppy disk, it looks like a 5.25-inch disk that got thrown into the Enlarge-o-Matic.

With certain exceptions, eight inches is a lot to carry around, and the floppy experienced some shrinkage at the hands of engineers. Specifically, Wang. The company asked Shugart to make a floppy the size of a paper napkin. That turned out to be 5.25 inches, and so did the disks, which debuted in the mid-'70s. They held 110 KB. In 1978 double-sided disks came out, followed by "double-density" versions that held up to 360 KB. The 5.25-inch disk reached its apex with 1.2 MB "high density" versions. (A couple of 10-packs would hold an entire average hard drive of the time.)

But 5+ inches was still too big for people who grew up watching Star Trek. Other sizes appeared, but in 1984 Apple chose Sony's 3.5-inch drive, which held about 875 KB — a little less than the text of an average book. A few years later Sony came out with a 1 MB version.

Apple's move 'collapsed the waveform' (you physics folks know what I mean), and the small, stiff, tough, 3.5-inch disk became the standard. It gradually grew in capacity to 360 KB, then 720 KB, then finally the 1.44 MB double-sided, high-density kind we still have around.

With the exception of a few interesting experiments such as with "bubble memory," magnetic media seemed to reach its end for most people, although Bernoulli, Zip, and Jaz drives were popular for a while, especially for graphic artists.

The reason was the rise of optical media — specifically, writable and rewritable CDs and later DVDs.

There's a light over at the data-storage place

The first CDish player was invented in the late '60s by James Russell, although it didn't appear on consumers' radar till Philips and Sony introduced theirs in 1982. A CD — etched and read by different kinds of laser — is nowhere near as fragile as a floppy disk. It's more resistant to the environment and doesn't have any moving parts to wear out.

As tough, sturdy, portable storage, CDs were tough to beat. The 680 or so megabytes they held was enough for an album of music or a pretty large number of data files. It didn't fit into anything but a coat pocket, but it was a great way to tow your data and music.

What was left? Video, for one, and really large amounts of data — encyclopedias, for example. The answer appeared in September 1995 with the announcement of the DVD or digital versatile disk, as a combination of two competing formats: Super Disc and Multimedia CD. A little more than a year later the first players and disks appeared.

A standard DVD can hold 4.7 GB per side, and double-sided disks are common — you can rent DVDs with two different versions of the same film. But new DVD technology is coming down the pike: multi-layered disks, HD disks (holding 15 GB), "Blu-Ray" disks using more accurate lasers that will hold 25 GB per side, and more.

In other words, optical-recording technology is moving along nicely, thank you.

But — believe it or not — this column was about the evolution of portable storage. And when it comes to that, CDs and DVDs have some significant shortcomings.

First, they're big. The disks can't fit in a pocket easily, and when you put a player around them the whole package is way big. Second, they're portable but not moveable; because they involve a moving laser and densely packed data, rough movement like jogging can cause them to skip (if you're willing to carry so much weight while hitting the pavement).

Then there's the whole problem of putting stuff on disks. Burning a CD isn't an instantaneous thing — you need to run special software that isn't always terribly fast, and you have to use disposable CD-Rs (many audio CD players can't handle rewritable CDs). This makes CDs and DVDs good archival formats, but not the best things for transport.

Flash: Savior of the universe?

Enter flash RAM — solid-state memory (no moving parts) that keeps what's stored on it even without power. Digital cameras are prime users, with their CompactFlash and SD memory cards holding hundreds or thousands of megabytes in a tiny space.

Flash memory can be rewritten thousands of times. It's tough, small, and has lots of space. For a while it was expensive, but prices have come down. A lot. USB keychains holding a gigabyte of data can be had for not much more than $100, and $80 (or less) can score you a flash-memory-based MP3 player with 256 MB of space. (Check out Kevin Maney's column from the other day for lots more about portable flash memory devices.)

But the quest for the ultimate portable storage continued. While a gigabyte in a thing the size of your pinkie may sound like a lot, a gigabyte isn't all that much, especially as today's computers are sporting 100+ GB hard drives as standard equipment.

Hard drives have been getting smaller and smaller as users demanded smaller laptops. The original hard disks were far from small; my friend Tommy used to have an old DEC PDP-11 computer in his living room, with hard disk platters the size of dinner plates. Large dinner plates.

Today, most desktop PCs have 3.5" hard disks that hold dozens of gigabytes, and laptops have even smaller drives that hold almost as much. Nothing else that's not the human brain holds so much data in so little space.

Realizing that some users would want to carry more than a few dozen songs, companies like Apple designed some of their portable players with hard drives rather than flash memory. Hard drives can store a lot more data than plain ol' RAM, at least until MRAM hits the mainstream.

The IBM Microdrive, now made by Hitachi, can fit 4 GB in the space smaller than a matchbook. IPods and other portable music players have more room than that, so they can sport those monster hard drives. (And last year's worries about those drives holding up under stress are all but gone. One example: The Western Digital Scorpio drives are rated to withstand 250 Gs while operating.)

What is this all leading to? Today we can carry not only our music, but all our music. Tomorrow we'll be able to carry all our data; PowerHouse Technologies makes the Migo, which allows Windows users to carry their data, settings, favorites, and desktop to any other computer.

I can see the day when we have everything we digitally own in the palm of our hands. Computers — the part that does the processing — will be commodities. At work, home, visiting friends, or in a hotel, you'll pop in your data module and whatever machine is in front of you will be yours till the next person comes along.

Till then, though, we'll have to settle for our tunes.

Andrew Kantor is a technology writer, pundit, and know-it-all who covers technology for the Roanoke Times. He's also a former editor for PC Magazine and Internet World. Read more of his work at kantor.com. His column appears Fridays on USATODAY.com.